“Stay right whah you is till I come back, I tell you,” she commanded, looking at him fixedly for several seconds before going inside.
Chester sat down again and waited on the steps for her to return.
After a while she came back with a cup of salt in her hand, and stood mumbling some unintelligible words, as she sprinkled the salt across the threshold, in the form of a cross. Having finished, she said to him:
“De one dey call Chester kin come in, now. But w’at be fol’rin ’im, gotta stay out-do’s.”
He made no comment about the strange invitation, but got up and went inside.
The room was in semi-darkness; the only light being the reflected glow of a candle in the back room, and a narrow stream of moonlight coming through the open door at the front, falling across the well-scrubbed floor like a stripe of tarnished silver.
“Set hyuh whah I kin seen you,” Tempe said; placing a chair near the door where the moonlight would fall across him.
Chester took the offered seat, and Tempe sat down opposite, half-hidden in the shadow.
“You mus’ bin know I wan’ see you?” she asked. And without waiting for his reply, she went on speaking in a kind of ecstasy: